C# 3.0 makes OCL redundant!

Other than its 'platform independence' the major advantages of OCL over traditional Object Oriented programming languages has been the declarative nature of the language, its powerful navigation facility via the iteration operations, and the availability of tuples as a first class concept. The recent offering from Microsoft of the "Orcas" version of Visual Studio with C# 3.0 and the Linq library provides functionality almost identical to that of OCL. This paper examines and evaluates the controversial thesis that, as a result of C# 3.0, OCL is essentially redundant, having been superseded by the incorporation of its advantageous features into a mainstream programming language

Why languages differ : variation in the conventionalization of constraints on inference

Sperber and Wilson (1996) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) have argued that communication involves two processes, ostension and inference, but they also assume there is a coding-decoding stage of communication and a functional distinction between lexical items and grammatical marking (what they call 'conceptual' vs. 'procedural' information). Sperber and Wilson have accepted a basically Chomskyan view of the innateness of language structure and Universal Grammar

How functional programming mattered

In 1989 when functional programming was still considered a niche topic, Hughes wrote a visionary paper arguing convincingly ‘why functional programming matters’. More than two decades have passed. Has functional programming really mattered? Our answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’. Functional programming is now at the forefront of a new generation of programming technologies, and enjoying increasing popularity and influence. In this paper, we review the impact of functional programming, focusing on how it has changed the way we may construct programs, the way we may verify programs, and fundamentally the way we may think about programs

On non-overt specifiers

I consider non-overt specifiers, in particular two contexts in which they have been posited. First, SpecIP: in finite clauses in nullsubject languages, SpecIP is standardly assumed to be occupied by a null pronominal (little pro) (Rizzi 1982a). Second, SpecNegP: in negative clauses in languages whose sole overt negative marker is associated with NegE, SpecNegP is claimed to be occupied by a null polarity operator (OP) (Haegeman 1995). A specifier, like a complement, is a syntactic dependant of a head. I argue that the null hypothesis is that a head does not have a dependant unless it needs one; a head is capable of ‘doing its job’ on its own, and will therefore be dependant-free, unless it is in some relevant sense lacking, whereby the dependant provides what is missing. In this light, I review the evidence for non-overt specifiers in SpecIP/Spec-NegP and show that the evidence does not stand up to close examination, and that the facts can be accounted for by assuming that the relevant heads can ‘do their job’ without a specifier, and that, consequently, their projections not only have no overt specifier, but actually have no specifier position, either, and therefore no nonovert specifier